Death rites, p.13
Death Rites, page 13
He was running out of options, so he took his chance. He pushed open the door and entered the darkness.
‘Who’s there?’ The girl’s voice was groggy. She had been asleep, but a primaeval sense of danger had caused her to wake up. He crossed to her and put his hand over her mouth, and she bit him. The shock had stirred a base passion in him too and he slapped her, keeping his hand over her mouth. She’d fought him; he’d give her credit for her resilience. He’d had to use the knife he’d carried with him since the beginning; a reserve in case things didn’t go to plan. There had been mess and stink, which wasn’t his thing at all.
When it was over, he’d turned his back on the girl he later knew to be called Madison Knowles. He’d looked for a candle and found one. What was it with students and scented candles? Lighting the flame, he’d held it up against the frame of the window and made his scorch marks. He’d been shocked at how long it took, and he’d been forced to remain at the scene longer than he’d have liked. The singeing had brought to mind earlier burnings within the home. Fire had been one of the few protective elements available to settlers and they had embraced it with a fervour which was now lost.
The killing on that hot June night had taught him a valuable lesson. He didn’t like to improvise, and he didn’t like blood. He’d made sure for the next deaths that he had a syringe filled with his drug of choice. In the end, he hadn’t had to use it until he’d entered that house on Penn Street, but Jessica Sherwood had been almost dead anyway.
Standing at his own window, he touched the frame, feeling the ridges of the scorch marks. For the first time since he began, he sensed danger and wondered about its origin.
25
‘To be honest, I thought Anna had upset you at Albert’s party. She was a little spiky that evening.’
Carla waved away Jack’s apology. He’d suggested a downtown French restaurant on the opposite side of the river to where Lauren had entered the water. In the distance, through the window, she could see the spire of St Luke’s illuminated in the night sky. The street had a row of eateries, all of which appeared to be doing a decent trade. Inside the French bistro, Jack took a moment to look round at the diners. Perhaps he was checking to see if there was anyone he recognised. Satisfied, he guided her to a table in the middle of the room.
‘What did you think of the party? We only had time for a brief chat and then I lost you. I saw you chatting to Viv Kantz, who’s usually good value. Did you manage to speak to anyone else in the department?’
‘I met a few colleagues, but I’m afraid I used the chance to catch up with the lieutenant as I’d been called to help the police. I don’t know if you heard about it.’
Jack smirked. ‘I heard about it from Max. I’m afraid his nose was a little out of joint.’
‘He was trying very hard to hide his pique when I told him I’d been down to Silent Brook.’
Jack again cast his gaze around the restaurant. ‘Find anything interesting?’
Carla regarded him. He radiated a certain amount of satisfaction at Max’s resentment, but she also got the impression he was fishing for information.
‘It was a terrible scene and I’m afraid I wasn’t much help.’ She watched his reaction. ‘I don’t know why I was asked. Viv Kantz comes across as very competent and I was dealing with a recent crime. I’ve come across the occasional old crimes in digs, but my skills aren’t transferable. Have you helped Viv at all?’
‘Haven’t been asked.’ Jack shrugged and pointed at a blackboard. ‘If you like Moules Frites, I’d recommend them.’
‘Suits me.’
Jack ordered a bottle of white wine and leant back in his chair. ‘Despite what Max says we’ve only been called in a handful of times and I’m pretty sure this is only the second murder. Lauren was called into the scene of that freshman.’
‘Madison Knowles.’
‘Right. I heard about it when I came for my interview and it felt, you know, cutting edge being allowed in on an investigation.’
‘But she didn’t discover anything, did she?’
Jack shrugged, pouring them both a glass of wine before picking up his own. ‘Maybe not.’
‘You mean she did?’
‘Not at the beginning, I believe. I never actually asked her about it once I’d started the job, but she seemed to rekindle her interest earlier this year.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I asked her one day where she was going, and she mentioned the sorority house. This was a long time after the killing, so I wondered what she was up to. I suppose it helped her take her mind off things.’
‘What things?’
Jack frowned. ‘You heard she ended her life, right?’
‘I heard.’
‘Well, she was having a difficult time in her personal life. She’d been seeing someone, and he finished it. I think she’d fallen for him hard.’
‘Someone in college?’
‘I doubt it. It’s hard to keep anything secret in Jericho, although I might be wrong.’
She remembered Max’s distress at her office still filled with Lauren’s things. Hard, but not impossible.
‘You know,’ Carla frowned, ‘relationships end all the time. Presumably this wasn’t the first time Lauren had been dumped. Why the extreme reaction?’
Jack shrugged. ‘I don’t know. When you put it like that, it does sound odd, but every relationship is different. It might have been emotionally abusive, perhaps she had more expectations of this man than previous partners. I don’t know, but she went from being dynamic and involved to a shadow of her former self towards the end of her life.’
Carla let out a stream of air. ‘Why am I getting the impression that I’m only seeing the surface of what’s going on in Jericho?’
Jack frowned. ‘There is only surface in Jericho. That’s the point. Funnily enough, you remind me a little of Lauren.’
‘I do? In what way?’
‘I got the impression she wasn’t much impressed by Jericho either.’
Carla laughed, pleased. ‘Where was she originally from?’
‘Phoenix, which is a little different from here.’
‘I saw lots of photos of the desert.’
‘That was her specialism. Archaeology of New Mexico and Arizona. Her classes were popular because she used to organise summer digs in the west. I personally can’t think of anywhere worse than the desert in summer but, as I say, it was popular.’
Carla thought how different the wide Arizona landscape would be to the refined society of Jericho. For different reasons, Lauren would have felt an outsider like Carla. Unlike her, however, she was lacking the survival instinct. Because she’d taken a night swim with stones in her pocket and Carla would never contemplate that, and not just because Dan had taken the same route. There was a flicker of hope in Carla that refused to extinguish itself however bad things got. She looked over at Jack. His French heritage was evident in his dark brown hair. She’d have liked to quiz him about his background, but this was a semi-professional dinner. Asking about his ancestry suggested an intimacy she didn’t want to push.
The waiter brought two bowls of mussels, the salty steam filling the air. Carla realised how hungry she was and picked up her fork. ‘Will Anna be late?’
Jack shrugged. ‘Doubt it. She knew I was inviting you out for a drink, just in case you think this is a little strange. I think she was a little embarrassed how she spoke to you the other day. Jericho is a small town.’
And she sent you to make amends, thought Carla. ‘What made you get into New England settlements, given you’re from Montreal?’
He gave her an amused glance. ‘The city’s only two hundred miles away but, anyway, my mother’s from Portland. I used to love visiting here. It’s got a sense of hidden history that I adore.’
Carla remembered Viv’s comment at the cheese and wine party. ‘Do you know the story of the lost child of Wachusett?’
‘Of course. A child, Lucy Keyes, went missing in the woods near the settlement of Wachusett. The parents went looking for her, but she was never found, and it sent the mother mad. She could be heard calling out the name Lucy for decades after. Why do you ask?’
‘Viv Kantz mentioned her in relation to the parents of Madison Knowles.’
‘Oh, that’s sad.’
‘You know,’ Carla kept her tone neutral, ‘another piece of New England lore I was thinking about was witch bottles. Do you know about them?’
‘Sure. The tradition was brought over from England and there have been quite a few discoveries in old settlements. It’s part of this region’s history.’
‘Right.’ Carla frowned, taking a sip of her wine. ‘So if, say, someone was wanting to repel evil spirits, what else might you find? Wasn’t there something about graffiti?’
‘Sure – there’s the letter V inverted twice to make an M representing the virgin mother. Or people might immure a cat in a wall. There are examples of mummified animals found by buildings. Then doll charms – often with curses attached. To be honest, I could go on about this all evening. Is there a reason why you’re so interested?’
Carla put down her wine glass and shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I think it’s fascinating, but what I’m interested in is the emotion behind these items of house protection.’
‘Emotions? How about fear and suspicion? You’re talking about an era of child mortality and crop failure. Tragedies were blamed on the devil and people looked to the objects around their house to repel evil spirits.’
‘You mention suspicion. This is where communities turn on each other.’
Jack put down his fork. ‘It doesn’t take much. Why are you asking?’
‘I saw some burn marks recently in an old house. I’m sure I remember reading about them.’
‘Taper burns? They’re another ritual of house protection. Reeds dipped into tallow and deliberately held against wooden linters, beams, window frames. It’s the idea of fighting fire with fire. We call it sympathetic magic.’
‘Why sympathetic?’
‘Basically, religion didn’t object as it didn’t explicitly contravene their own teachings. You’ll find plenty of churches with apotropaic marks. You know daisy wheels, the Marian symbol, other unending patterns.’
‘Fighting fire with fire, you said.’
‘Sorry, are you thinking of the woman in Silent Brook? Let’s change the subject.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘Where exactly did you see the taper marks? I’d be interested in taking a look myself.’
Carla forced a smile. ‘A private residence. I’ll ask the owner if I can show you sometime.’
26
After dinner with Jack, who had helped tease out some of the subtleties that Carla had forgotten, she was convinced that the unsolved murders were linked. She often warned her students against finding patterns where there were none, but from what she had discovered from the crime scene photos and from talking to Perez, there was a strong possibility of a link based on protective charms. Stella King had died with a horseshoe charm in her purse. Cheap and tacky it might be, but it represented a keepsake to ward off spirits. Had the girl bought it herself? Possibly. But it was equally likely that her killer had slipped it into her things. Once, the charm would be made of iron, considered to be a metal with magical properties. Enclosing a cemetery with iron railings was considered to encircle the souls of the dead. If Stella was the first death, and the horseshoe nothing more than a cheap trinket, then the killer had been playing around with substitution. The ill-fitting shoes might also have a role, but Carla couldn’t yet grasp the connection. Her theory must be watertight if she was going to present it to Viv and she would need to mull on the significance of the glittery pumps.
The room where Madison Knowles had died showed the taper marks that mirrored those previously discovered in seventeenth and eighteenth-century houses. They served as folk magic to scare away evil and that had satisfied householders. The detectives had either not spotted the burns or had dismissed them as scorch marks from a candle. Jessica Sherwood had pins, thread, wine, all of which might be found in a witch bottle, items not dissimilar to those scattered around Tiffany Stoker. There was a pattern, Carla was sure of it. But the nagging question, and this was much harder to answer, was why the women had been targeted. Perez had been sure Madison’s killing was down to location, but Carla could see no significance in a scrubby wasteland such as Silent Brook. The only way of discovering the connection was to revisit the sites once again.
Carla found the Franklin Mall on her car’s GPS. The cubist nightmare at the river had given Carla a low opinion of James Franklin’s design ethos, so she was surprised to see that the mall was a two-storey circular building with an organic feel to the design. She parked near an entrance and looked around. It was difficult to tell where exactly Stella had been found, but she could see nothing in the lot that echoed with Silent Brook. It was an ordinary suburban car park filled with cars and pickups. At night it presumably looked a little different but not a place to be feared.
She looked at her watch. It was too late to go back to the office and too early to retire home and listen to Patricia’s updates on the church bake. And she certainly wanted to avoid another invitation for a glass of sherry. As she felt a trickle of rain down her back, she decided she might as well take the time to shop for a new coat. Not for fieldwork. Her waxed jacket would serve her well for years to come, but something she could wear around college. As the doors swung open, Carla was momentarily disoriented. Instead of a straight row of stores, the corridor opened out like a petal and in the distance narrowed again. It made for an odd design ethic. Surely the point of a mall was that you looked at shops on both sides of you as you walked along. It’s what she did certainly, but anyway, she hated shopping and was always desperate to get it over with. Here, as shops curved away from each other, she was forced to choose a side and went to her left, looking for a women’s clothing store that wasn’t too expensive. When she got to the end of the corridor, she realised she was in the centre of the building. She looked up and saw that the level above was a food court while the ground floor space could be used for music events and fashion shows. A woman was singing into a microphone and a crowd huddled around her, clapping out of rhythm to the tune. Carla stopped for a moment to listen to the music, her eyes taking in the other ‘petals’ leading from the centre. Petals?
Two hours later, she was a hundred and fifty dollars lighter and had sunk two cups of coffee in quick succession, the caffeine struggling to keep up with her adrenaline. Erin lived in a tall townhouse that shrieked New England, but its interior was sparse in contrast to Patricia’s homespun decor. As Carla had suspected, there was no sign of a husband, but she did encounter a six-foot-tall teenager who made himself a peanut butter sandwich while Carla gulped at the glass of wine Erin had proffered. Erin had looked surprised to see her but had opened the door wide and pulled her inside.
‘So let me get this right. You have this idea that the items left around the Silent Brook victim were a sort of deconstructed witch bottle.’
‘If there is a pattern, then it would make sense. These witch bottles were handmade. You would take bits and pieces from the home and stuff them into it. Stuff that had a significance – teeth, needles, wine, feathers but also glass and coins. As we saw around the victim.’
‘And what does Viv say about all this?’
‘I don’t think she has a problem with me suggesting there’s some kind of ritual protection around the death of Tiffany Stoker, but she’s not much interested in connecting the cases. As far as she’s concerned, I’m a rank amateur.’
Erin snorted into her glass. ‘Well, you are.’
‘The main point is that I’m pretty sure I can identify similar objects around the deaths of the other three women. There is a connection, I’m sure of it.’
Erin looked unconvinced. ‘If, from what you tell me, everyday objects were given magical properties, then aren’t you going to find these in a house anyway? Wine, coins, thread. You’ll find it here. Does that mean I’m a target?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Isn’t there a possibility that you’re seeing patterns where there are none? Use your scientific brain. Suppose a student came to you at a dig and made these assumptions. Wouldn’t you ask for more evidence?’
‘Of course I would, which is precisely the reason I haven’t gone to Viv yet. I don’t want to be laughed out of the place.’
‘And what about the Franklin Mall? You have to be careful. Franklin’s a big cheese round here. What’s his mall got to do with any of this?’
Carla took a breath, wondering if she was sounding insane. ‘The design is a really strange pattern. From the outside it’s round, so what you’d expect inside would be a centre and shops radiating out from the hub.’
‘Makes sense.’ Erin topped up Carla’s glass.
‘And that’s what you have to a certain extent, but these rows aren’t parallel. They’re shaped like this.’
Carla retrieved her notepad and drew a flower shape. ‘Can you see? There are six entrances to the mall, which I guess isn’t particularly unusual. When you wander up and down though, the shops sort of bow away from you and then come back together in the middle. It makes for a daisy wheel pattern.’
‘Okaaay.’ Erin gave the drawing on the pad a glance. ‘The architect liked daisies. What’s this got to do with anything?’
‘Daisy wheels are often inscribed on buildings. Above doors, in attics, in cupboards. They serve a similar purpose to the witches’ bottles. They’re known as hexafoils or apotropaic marks. They can be quite complex, wheels within wheels, but the essence is the same. You can draw it with a compass, and it consists of a single endless line to confuse spirits and trap them within the design.’
